Table of contents for Issue 70 August 2007 in RUE MORGUE

Ah, Halloween. That wonderfully spooky and festive holiday horror fans live for. It’s a special time of year that marks the absolute death of summer and the beginning of a long winter. It’s also the day where the dead come to life… mostly through the imaginations of children. At dusk, the tiny ghouls emerge, the chilly autumn air appropriately perfumed by the scent of decay and the shrill cries of the little ones as they run from house to house, trading scares for sugared treats. If you’re a regular reader of this space you already know that, growing up, I didn’t really have the opportunity to celebrate most holidays – Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter – in the way that most others did, and in some cases, not at all. Thankfully, my…

Weird Stats Morbld Facts + The Caribbean island of Martinique had a rather unusual nickname in the late 1880s; it was called Le pays des revenants (The Country of the Comers-Back), a handle that specifically references zombies. + Olga Baclanova, the actress who played the villainess Cleopatra in Tod Browning’s Freaks, built her own father’s coffin after his death during the Russian revolution. + Doctor-assisted suicide is legal in the state of Oregon, assuming the patient is terminally ill, mentally competent and can self-administer the lethal medication. In order for the doctor to provide the drug, the patient must ask twice verbally and once in writing. + Francis Ford Coppola once worked as Roger Corman’s assistant, earning $90 a week. + Phonophobia is defined as “a morbid fear of sounds…

Most twelve-year-olds would have run screaming to the nearest closet or fortified basement at the sight of iconic ghoul Michael Myers. But for a young Malek Akkad, son of the late Moustapha Akkad, executive producer of the Halloween series, the masked madman of Haddonfield was practically a friend of the family. “I was often on the set for Halloween II,” Malek recalls, “so I wasn’t scared when Michael Myers walked out. In fact, I have very fond memories of hanging out with Dick Warlock [who played Myers in the second film] and Jamie Lee [Curtis] – who is a remarkable woman – and the amazing John Carpenter.” Malek began working full-time in film as a teenager, serving as an associate producer of the Halloween series from Halloween IV on, so…

666: The Child Releasing a movie about the Antichrist on the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the new millennium was an ingenious advertising gimmick that the folks at The Asylum just couldn’t pass up (too bad the idea had already been thought of by the major studio remaking the original Omen). The result was 666: The Child, a story about a couple that adopts a child who’s the only survivor of a plane crash (Flight 7666 – subtle!). Unfortunately for them, new son Damien – er, “Donald” – is a devil-child. In scenes similar to The Omen, those who get in his way die horribly, the orphanage he’s from burns to the ground and the new nanny, Lucy Fir (groan…), is a servant of…

Inhabited by vampires, sadistic mailmen, big-box stores containing unspeakable evil and towering monsters seeking fornication with humans, the fictional universes created by best-selling author Bentley Little present a twisted, satirical view of the world his readers live in. For nearly twenty years the reclusive Fullerton, California-based author has been penning tales that are as terrifying as they are topical. With seventeen published books and multiple Bram Stoker nominations, Little’s ability to take current social concerns, such as man’s often devastating impact on the environment, and give them his own bizarre, ironic renderings has allowed him to create a unique niche in the genre – one where the things that go bump in the night may be supernatural but, more often than not, have been borne from the depths of our…

OH. MY. GAWTH. GOTH GIRLS Doorway Productions I love goth girls, and I want the world to know! That said, I hate Goth Girls, and I want the world to know that too. Divided into two tales of mind-numbing boredom, the first one, “A Deadly Friend,” sees a scumbag lawyer banging the most un-goth goth girl ever, only to find out she has a dark, deadly secret. The second one, “Tell-Tale Heart,” is a stinker so loosely based on Poe’s story that it must have old Edgar cartwheeling in his grave. (The awful jackhammer-alarm clock soundtrack doesn’t help matters either.) The only good thing about the disc is a bonus short, a rape-revenge film called Sinners. It’s got a real goth girl and should a been the main attraction. Body…

HARRY’S HOUSE OF EVIL MALPERTUIS (1972) Starring Mathieu Carrière, Susan Hampshire and Orson Welles Directed by Harry Kümel Written by Jean Ferry Barrel Entertainment Historically, directors with hit movies get to indulge themselves once. Unfortunately, that indulgence is usually accompanied by either studio interference or box office indifference. To wit: Malpertuis co-star Orson Welles made The Magnificent Ambersons after Citizen Kane and saw it cut to pieces by RKO. Likewise, Belgian director Harry Kümel had a hit with 1971’s Daughters of Darkness. Its combination of blood, sex, sensuality and humour was a box office sensation which earned it horror cult status. His follow-up, Malpertuis (1972), however, has been essentially lost. Originally entered at Cannes in a dubbed, dubiously edited version, the adaptation of Belgian author Jean Ray’s surreal novel lost…

Motion pictures consistently argue for the crucial importance of sound. Consider that John Carpenter could not get backing for Halloween until he laid down his self-penned score on its demo reels. But what works in one medium might follow a completely different, even arbitrary, set of rules in another. And while comic books can be quite cinematic, they are not cinema. In this context, up-and-coming Portland writer/artist Josh Simmons' House is a deft study in the terrifyingly unpredictable. On the surface, it’s a tale of trespassing gone horribly awry (to the point of becoming a claustrophobic descent into physical and existential hell). But it’s a wordless descent, with nary a verbal assay in over 100 pages. Silence here is not only golden, it speaks volumes. Best-known for the satirical comic…

Hitchcock and Philosophy: Dial M for Metaphysics David Baggett and William A. Drumin, eds. Open Court If the title of this book makes you recoil in terror because of all those boring university courses you were forced to take, then Hitchcock and Philosophy is not for you. But if you are a big fan of the work of Alfred Hitchcock and are sick and tired of the overabundance of psychoanalytical perspectives on his oeuvre, then this collection of academic articles might just be worth your time. With metaphysics, we are talking about the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality and being beyond the world of experience. Questions concerned with mind and matter, determinism and free will, and humanity’s place in the universe are central to a metaphysical…

Brattleboro, operated with the sanction of the town government until the feds shut it down in 2005. Last year, the former mill town made national news again when teens began congregating in a local parking lot, entirely nude. The main commercial drag even features a hemp-products store named Save The Corporations From Themselves. But beneath the New Age facade, another, older Brattleboro lies dreaming. This is the Brattleboro of H.P. Lovecraft’s master-work novella The Whisperer in Darkness, a story of covert extraterrestrial creatures with an out-post in the Vermont hills. The reclusive author never travelled widely, but in 1927 he visited southern Vermont. Relatively far from the more urban Providence and the New York City he loathed, the author was touched by the locale, writing, “entering Vermont for the first…

THANK YOU SO MUCH for your story on The Monster Squad! It was highly informative with no base left uncovered, from the actor interviews to the special effects construction. I’ve loved this movie since I was little and it’s always been so hard to find, but soon I’ll have my own copy to watch whenever I please. Kudos! Shannon Turner – Dallas, Texas AS A LONG-TIME READER, subscriber, woman, repeated rape victim AND fan of exploitation films, I take offense at Jovanka Vuckovic’s categorization of the movie I Spit on Your Grave in the June issue of Rue Morgue. It’s fine if you don’t care for the movie, but to dismiss it because, in your opinion, it “completely objectifies and debases women, reduces them to mere sexual objects and does…

THE GREAT CTHULHU $79.99 Standing at a whopping 16” tall, this Great Cthulhu sculpture/giant HorrorClix gaming piece is wide awake and well up for “killing and reveling in joy.” Artist Brian Dugas has created a meticulously detailed figure that appears wholly organic and is truly awe-inspiring. Hear the call at wizkidsgames.com. CRYSTAL SKULL NECKLACE $1385 If you have a penchant for things that go bling in the night (and a hefty wad of Mammon’s finest), you can sparkle like freshly spilled plasma with this 16” gem from Made Her Think. Each skull is made from clear crystal and separated by some beautiful, beastly Swarovski rounds. Pimp your pale throat at vivre.com. SPINE LAMP $1500 Artist Mark Beam brings a whole new meaning to the term “ergonomic furniture” with this spinal…

As a horror fan, Rob Zombie is living the dream – he’s been given the keys to the kingdom of his favourite franchise and the go-ahead to envision his ultimate version of Halloween. But you don’t have to be a rock star director with studio backing to indulge your love of a classic. These days, it’s easier than ever to make your own entry in a popular movie series. The ever-expanding supernova of internet fan culture, increasingly inexpensive and high-quality consumer-level filmmaking equipment, plus good old nostalgia have given rise to an era of cinematic re-appropriation, remixing and re-imagining. In short: fan films. For example, type “Star Wars fan film” into Google and you’ll get nearly 65,000 hits – links to spoofs, alternate storylines, entirely new tales set in the…

You don’t have to be a professor of film studies to understand that cinema is primarily a visual medium – a fact that goes a long way to explaining why so many of the most innovative minds in the genre got their start working in other visual art fields. Tim Burton cut his teeth painting animation cels for Disney, Guillermo del Toro apprenticed under makeup master Dick Smith and Stanley Kubrick’s first day job was as a photographer for Look magazine, so it isn’t a stretch to predict that the release of Cannibal Flesh Riot!, the first short film by Gris Grimly (RM#35) – best known for his playful, creepy illustrated children’s books – may signal a career change for the artist. The comedic story of two cannibalistic hayseeds whose…

Black Dahlia Movie blackdahliamovie.com Director Ramzi Abed’s pseudo-Lynchian take on Hollywood’s most famous unsolved murder case is not so much a movie about the Black Dahlia as it is a movie about a movie about the Black Dahlia. Black Dahlia Movie stars the immensely captivating Kristen Kerr (featured in David Lynch’s latest epic, Inland Empire) as Lisa Small, a modern-day ingénue out to land the part of Elizabeth Short (a.k.a. the Black Dahlia) in yet another film adaptation about the 1947 Hollywood murder victim. As Small gets deeper into the role, she begins to channel the spirit of the Black Dahlia herself, a connection that’s further fuelled by a Dahlia-obsessed psycho who’s bounding around Tinseltown bumping off every tasty brunette he can get his hands on. Despite an array of…

AN (UN)BURIED TREASURE THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940) Starring Dick Foran, Wallace Ford and George Zucco Directed by Christy Cabanne Written by Griffin Jay and Maxwell Shane Universal If there’s one thing you can’t accuse Universal of, it’s ignoring its stable of classic monster movies from the 1930s and ’40s. It seems that every few years Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and all their creature companions are called upon to rise from their eternal slumbers and once again ravage the home video market. Case in point: The Mummy’s first sequel, The Mummy’s Hand, has been on DVD almost since the beginning of the medium, and was later collected definitively in 2004’s The Mummy: The Legacy Collection. Still, that hasn’t stopped Universal from going back to the tana tree yet…

Kansas City, Missouri-based film-maker Todd Sheets is one of the pioneers of independent shot-on-video horror films. Since forming Extreme Entertainment in 1989, Sheets has produced and distributed a whopping seventeen movies. Three of those, comprise the thematically linked Zombie Bloodbath series, have recently been reissued by Camp Video in a bargain-priced, splatterific two-disc set. By today’s standards, Zombie Bloodbath (1993) is a typical low-budget gorefest. The government paves over the site of a nuclear accident and builds a subdivision on top of it. Years later, lots of zombies (more than 700!) rise and chase around a cast of earnest amateur actors. Tons of cheapjack gore is strung on an otherwise flimsy frame. Zombie Bloodbath 2: Rage of the Undead (1995) represents a leap in Sheets’ technical ability. A satanic cult…

Back in her college years, Jaye Barnes Luckett was known as “the go-to girl” for scoring student films, yet she never envisioned that she’d eventually earn a reputation for being the go-to composer for Lucky McKee’s deliciously weird feature-length movies. Now, some of her collaborations with the director – plus other works – have been compiled by La-La Land Records on May and Other Selected Works of Jaye Barnes Luckett. The limited edition 73-minute CD includes, of course, music from McKee’s standout film May (RM#34), as well as a suite of ambient tonalities and discordant sounds from The Toolbox Murders: As It Was (a making-of documentary on director Tobe Hooper’s remake of The Toolbox Murders, which starred frequent McKee collaborator Angela Bettis); tracks from McKee’s Masters of Horror episode “Sick…

Russian gore film marks first feature from Unearthed Cult DVD label Unearthed Films, the North American distributors of notorious video nasties like Nacho Cerdà’s Aftermath and the Japanese Guinea Pig series, have recently completed production on their first feature film, Philosophy of a Knife, by Russian director Andrey Iskanov. “We decided to move into production for the simple fact that we can promote the best underground directors and artists the horror industry is currently breeding,” explains Unearthed head Stephen Biro. “The people we are working with in Russia have wonderful careers ahead of them and by helping them with production and sales, we hope to help them gain the notoriety they deserve.” Philosophy of a Knife is the third feature from Iskanov, whose previous work includes the highly stylized and…

You just knew that someone would go for it eventually – Day of the Living Dying, a horror film that began production on June 6, is attempting to set a world record for the most zombies ever onscreen. “It started at Film Fantastic in Australia many months back,” explains actor/director Dennis Baker, the “brains” behind the project. “We set up a blue screen and filmed people in makeup and costume against it. We’ve been doing the same at film festivals across the US, and people have been sending in their videos by mail or uploading [them] to gofish.com. We’ve even gotten some footage from various zombie walks.” While there are already a few internet series where viewers can participate, Day of the Living Dying takes the concept to a whole…

TORTUROUS INDEED HOSTEL: PART II Starring Lauren German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo Written and directed by Eli Roth Maple With barely a handful of films to his credit, Eli Roth has made a big, bloody mark on the face of horror. He’s the bad boy director who likes gross-out gore just as much as juvenile humour and he’s equally at home in the pages of Maxim as he is in Rue Morgue. Curious then that Hostel: Part II, the follow-up to his box-office success “torture porn” gorefest, features a group of females who are captured and mutilated in the infamous Slovakian dungeon. It makes one wonder: does Roth push the boundaries of acceptability too far? Is it more hype than hardcore horror? Sadly, the hype wins. Oh sure, there’s…

THE TEETH BENEATH 45 mins teethbeneath.com With a title like that it’s no surprise The Teeth Beneath is fun and fast-paced. It was co-directed by Canadian Jason Eisener, one of the talents behind the brilliant trailer that played in front of Grindhouse, Hobo With a Shotgun. Somewhere between Evil Dead and Clerks, the film revolves around a crew of slacker skate shop employees who must do battle against the forces of evil hidden in their store’s shadowy basement and clean up the bloody mess – all before opening time in one hour. Shot primarily at Pro Skates, co-director Zach Tovey’s Halifax-based store, and embellished with occasional flashes of skateboarding, The Teeth Beneath may not be the most original indie horror out there, but it’s still a skillfully crafted, frequently funny…

“THE DEVIL’S NIGHTMARE IS ONE FILM THAT EVERY GOOD LITTLE TRASH MOVIE MUTHAFUCKA NEEDS TO SEE.” According to the Bible, if you habitually indulge in any combination of the Seven Deadly Sins, you’ll spend an eternity broiling in the flaming chasms of perdition once you croak. However, according to director Jean Brismée’s 1971 Belgian/Italian exploitation horror opus The Devil’s Nightmare, any dabblings in capital vice will instead conjure up a see-through negligee-clad Erika Blanc (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, Kill Baby Kill) to shake her Beelzebub-ian booty before bringing your naughty ass down. Methinks the latter fate is far preferable to the former, and certainly sitting through this unsung Eurotrash sleaze gem (which has haunted the public domain under myriad titles) is an even sweeter punishment. If…

What do vampires, a World War I captain and a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen have in common? It may sound like a riddle, but these seemingly unrelated things collide in Baltimore, a new illustrated novel from Mike Mignola and Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Christopher Golden that was largely inspired by the Gothic novels of the Victorian era. “I’m a big fan of old supernatural literature and the further back you go in [it] the less rules and regulations there are about vampires,” explains Mignola, who confesses that Baltimore (available August 28 from Bantam) is a loving tribute to Dracula, but also adds, “I purposely didn’t want the Bram Stoker vampire, I wanted a vampire that could be anything. I wanted that kind of fairy-tale logic you get in…

Soundtrack BUG Brian Tyler LIONSGATE RECORDS Brian Tyler’s latest score is a stellar work that shifts into completely distinct musical styles, but forms a striking, albeit experimental narrative. Elegant tracks of grating digital screeching and thumping percussion lard the score, while the main contrasting elements consist of bite-sized techno morsels, a glob of heavy metal and a lulling minimalist title theme played on piano. It’s a marvelous collision of genres, and you could characterize the score’s juiciest parts as dissonant Ry Cooder propelled by the abstract electronica that made Gil Melle’s Andromeda Strain such a landmark score. Bug’s sonic ties to Melle’s crisp, analogue synthetics appropriately conjure visions of cold, mechanical evil that breeds and erupts like a viral colony, and those unsettling, repeated piano solos form a suitable lament…

GRAPHICS PLAYABLITY SHIVERS HIGHEST RATING IS THREE. HORRORCLIX: HELLBOY AND ALIEN VS. PREDATOR Miniature RPG Wizkids In 2006 Wizkids introduced the HorrorClix gaming system (RM#62), which set a new standard for the way miniature horror RPGs are played. By employing fantastically detailed pre-painted figures with their own “clickable” bases, players use the innovative pieces to dial up and keep track of their strengths and any damage they suffer. Complete with large fold-out playing maps, character cards detailing special abilities, plot twist cards, victim tokens and easy-to-follow rules, it was an instant hit. Joining the fast-growing collection of HorrorClix monsters are two new character sets featuring familiar faces. The first set includes Hellboy and some of his sidekicks – researchers from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, such as Liz…